Indigenous peoples are displaced by wars and corporations

Avatar is real: Pandora exists in our planet and it’s located in South and Central America, and Africa. The Na’vi peoples, the Indigenous peoples in those regions are being displaced and killed right now, in order to extract the natural resources laying underground. The names of places and peoples may be different in the movie, but the facts of reality are almost the same.

Distant regions of green, tropical forests rich in beauty are in danger, due to their abundance in unknown treasures hidden behind human’s eyes. In order to get those resources needed by rich countries, multinational corporations are using governments, armed forces, paramilitary and guerrillas to massacre and displace Indigenous peoples.

In the next generation, Central and South America will be the next battle fields for rich countries fighting over natural resources which they need to continue growing and keeping up with their consumerists, excessive ways of life. Minerals, oil, drinkable water, natural gas, forest and bio-tech resources are widely available in areas kept in balance by Native peoples for thousands of years.

Thus, the last pristine virgin forests on Earth, could be taken over by powerful military armies, working on behalf of multinational corporations, especially those based in the U.S., Europe, and Canada; and perhaps soon India, China, and Russia.

This is not fiction. It’s happening already in the tropical forests and mountains of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, where big mining, oil, lodging, tourism, real state, pharmaceutical corporations are invading the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples and stealing their cultures and heritage in order to profit, all of which is done with the complicity of the local puppet governments.

In the film, the attacking thugs were a bunch of cold hearted and insensitive corporate and military folks who would invest money in science, researching and cultural programs in order to win the hearts and minds of Indigenous peoples living in sacred, untouched, pristine forests of a balanced but fragile environment. Those places are the final destinations for destructive mining machinery, ready to extract the insides of the mother land.

Sebastian Machineri is a leader of the Yaminawa indigenous people that live in the border area of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, deep in the Amazon forest. He was recently in Washington, DC, participating at a working meeting of the Organization of American States for a continental declaration of Indigenous rights. Sebastian Machineri told me that Indigenous peoples in Brazil are being killed, attacked, displaced, and exterminated by the federal government and private ranch owners. “I have no hope that anything will change in the near future” he added, when I asked if international legislation in behalf of Indigenous peoples rights -like the UN declaration adopted in 2006- can help. He said that greedy powerful interests are pushing governments to destroy our planet.

This is the truth. In 2009 the Indigenous peoples around the Americas faced increasing violence, deadly military attacks, displacement, persecution and incarceration from governments, paramilitaries, guerrillas and military forces linked to corporate interests and extractive industries.

In order to do displace Indigenous peoples, governments in Latin America are forced by powerful interest groups to pass special legislation based on the “free-trade” policies model, which was designed by Wall Street. This economic trend known as “neoliberalism” has opened the doors of protected areas to private corporations with enough money and influences to do what they please, without considering the rights of the Indigenous peoples living there.

Last June 2009 in Peru, hundreds of Awajun and Wampis Indigenous farmers were massacred by US-trained militarized police forces of Peru, in the Bagua region. The Natives were protesting peacefully against government legislation that allowed corporations to take over their lands resources, without previous consultation. Also as a result, many policemen of Indigenous heritage were killed by a riot of Natives who heard of the Bagua massacre. Months later, the Awajun and Wampis peoples detained five employees of the Canadian mining company IAMGOLD, who didn’t have authorization to enter their territory.

In several regions of Peru, mining corporations are causing pollution and the poisoning of entire Indigenous towns. This has led to social protests and a growing Indigenous movement, but the response of president Alan Garcia has been of racism, violence and repression, accusing the Natives as terrorists, criminals and second-class citizens. Many community leaders have been incarcerated when protesting against the government plans, which includes leasing 73% of the Amazon forest and extensive areas of the Andean mountains to multinationals.

In 2006 the Bush administration forced Peruvians to accept an abusive free trade agreement (FTA) which was entirely written in the United States. The massacre of Bagua was an indirect result of the policies included in that FTA. The authorities of Cusco were forced to pass legislation that bans bio-piracy or “the appropriation and monopolization of traditional population’s knowledge and biological resources”, in order to prevent the negative effects of the unpopular and controversial U.S.-Peru FTA. But that is not it.

Jeremy Hance denounces more atrocities faced by Indigenous peoples in Peru in this excellent article posted by Mongabay News:

Just weeks after the bloody incident [of Bagua], Texas-based Hunt Oil, with full support of the Peruvian government, moved into the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve with helicopters and large machinery for seismic testing. A scene not unlike Avatar, which shows a corporation entering indigenous territory with gun ships. The seismic testing alone involves 300 miles of testing trails, over 12,000 explosive charges, and 100 helicopter land pads in the middle of a largely-untouched and unknown region of the Amazonian rainforest. The reserve, which was created to protect native peoples’ homes, may soon be turned into a land of oil scars. Indigenous groups say they were never properly consulted by Hunt Oil for use of their land. [...]

In the film the Na’vi are dismissed as “blue monkeys” and “savages” by the corporate administrator. Both the corporation and their hired soldiers view the Na’vi as less than human.

In Peru, President Alan Garcia has called indigenous people “confused savages”, “barbaric”, “second-class citizens”, “criminals”, and “ignorant”. He has even compared tribal groups to the nation’s infamous terrorists, the Shining Path.

There is no end in sight in the struggle between the indigenous people of Peru and government-sanctioned corporate power.

Lets move on to Colombia, where the Amazonian Indigenous peoples are caught in the middle of the internal war between the government, the guerrillas and the government-supported paramilitary. Twenty members of the Awa Indigenous community were killed in 2009 by the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and by the end of the year 74 more Awas were killed by paramilitary groups linked to the illegal drugs cartels. Many Indigenous peoples are forced to leave their lands due to this type of violence, and the abandoned lands are taken by agro business corporations.

Also last year, more than 2,000 Indigenous Embera people in Colombia have abandoned 25 villages and their territory, in order to escape violence from paramilitaries. Meanwhile the Colombian House of Representatives approved a controversial program to convince local women to submit to sterilization. This same type of program has affected over 330,000 Indigenous women and men in Peru in the 1990s.

In the Pacific region of Colombia, the Afro Colombian population continues to endure violence, killings and displacement. Just last month the leaders Manuel Moya, Graciano Blandon and his son were assassinated by the paramilitary. Over 4 million Colombians have been displaced by this type of violence created by the guerrillas, the military and right-wing paramilitaries, who have strong ties to the Alvaro Uribe government.

The same tragedy is occurring all over the continent. According to information posted by John Schertow of the Indigenous news website “Intercontinental Cry”, these are some of the most violent attacks faced by Native peoples in Central and South America in 2009:

In central Brazil, the Yanomami community of Paapiu began calling for the immediate expulsion of illegal gold miners occupying their land. Survival International reported, “[the Yanomami] say they are prepared to use bows and arrows to expel the invaders themselves if the authorities do not take immediate action.”

The Guarani Kaiowa community of Apyka´y in Brazil was attacked by ten gunmen, who fired shots in to their camp, wounding one person. The gunmen also beat up and injured others with knives and then set fire to their village. This was the second village torched in less than a week.

As many as 300 troops from Panama’s National Police demolished a Naso village in Bocas del Toro–for the second time. No injuries were reported, however, some 150 adults and 65 children were left with no shelter and limited access to food and water.

Following an overturned eviction, an Ava Guarani indigenous community in Paraguay’s Itakyry district was sprayed with toxic chemicals, most likely pesticide, resulting in nearly the entire village needing medical treatment.

In Guatemala, a group of Maya Mam villagers set fire to a pickup truck and an exploration drill rig, after the Canadian company Goldcorp repeatedly failed to remove the equipment off the community’s land.

In Chile, several Mapuche communities began to reclaim their lands in Araucania, a region located in the center of the country, which they say were stolen in the XVI century during the Hispanic invasion. At least five people have been killed by the Chilean government, which has passed strong anti-terrorism legislation to imprison and trial Mapuche indigenous leaders.

In Ecuador, Indigenous peoples are suing U.S. oil corporations for damages to their Amazonian forest land and water pollution. Meanwhile the leftist government of Rafael Correa has tried to betray its electoral promises, by selling extensive lands to oil and mining corporations. The response was a strong national strike and social protests.

The panorama is different in Bolivia, where Indigenous people are moving towards self-government under their own cultural traditions, after the December 6 presidential and legislative elections. In those elections 12 of the 327 municipalities of the country voted in favor of Indigenous collective self-government, giving them control over the natural resources and their land. The same model, but at a smaller scale is being applied in Venezuela by the government of president Hugo Chavez, which is giving its Indigenous populations the right to own their ancestral lands.

Unfortunately, justice for Indigenous peoples seem to be wrong for the Obama administration, already controlled by the same corporate interests of its predecessors. A biased U.S. media often attacks the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, while it remains silent in the massacres of Indigenous peoples in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and the violent repression in Chile and Ecuador, or the violence promoted by the coup regime of Honduras where death squads trained in the U.S. are killing the opposition including Garifuna, Miskito and other Indigenous groups.

The future of Central and South America -and Africa- depends directly of how much power is retained by rich countries and their multinational corporations, in those regions. In the last decades, Wall Street and London have told poor nations that small governments are the key for progress and development. The less control, the more democracy, more human rights and especially more foreign investment. This model has failed.

We see what is happening right now in Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, etc. where weak governments can’t stop internal wars financed by rich countries and private corporations. Only in Congo this type of violence has caused over 6 million people killed and 500 thousands men and women being raped. This is a painful proof that governments need to be strong, that people must take control of their destinies, not corporations.

Growing up in South America, we were told that our Indigenous people were exterminated, disseminated, gone. Therefore they taught us in schools that nothing was left to reverse the colonization process, that our peoples could never dare to stop it. We were told we weren’t Indigenous anymore.

In reality, there is so much all we people -of every race- can do in order to stop the imperialist oppression of Indigenous peoples, and the destruction of our planet. Everyone can do something, because in the end this is about the survival of the whole human race and our home, our mother land.

We need to stand against rich countries oppressing poorer nations with direct military invasions or with provoked internal conflicts. It’s happening today in Congo, Uganda, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Mexico, Colombia, Yemen, Burma, Pakistan, Nigeria, Peru, etc.

Like in Avatar, this Pandora-like violence against Indigenous communities all over the world is promoted by a racist, selfish sector of United States government and corporate involvement in military invasions, coups, paramilitary groups, training of torturers and repressive forces, and financing of anti-Indigenous governments.

For instance, during the Bush administration, the strategy to take over the natural resources of Latin America was domitated by free-trade agreements (FTA) and the funding of violent conflicts in Colombia, Haiti, and Mexico. Thousands of civilians have been killed, many of whom were Indigenous and Afro descendants.

In 2009 with Barack Obama in power, the U.S. government has slowed down on its FTA policies but the Pentagon has confirmed the opening of seven military bases in Colombia, while it has possibly increased its presence in Peru with three military stations. The Pentagon’s Southern Command has also increased military exercise programs conducted with Peru, Panama, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, while Chile received approval from U.S. Congress to obtain high technology war missiles.

In Avatar, the main destructive leaders were the military chief and the corporate boss. The relation between U.S. military intervention and corporate interests is never more obvious than in Colombia. As the second biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world -after Israel- Colombia is an important source of oil, minerals, cocaine and agro business which are crucial for the U.S. economy. Its neighbor Venezuela is not taking these close ties too lightly, and recently the Chavez government has bought armament from Russia, China and possibly Iran.

In the James Cameron’s film Avatar, the US military became a sophisticated army of private mercenaries, working in behalf of extractive industries and its huge profits. No matter what they needed to destroy or who they had to kill, they had to get the job done. The “Sky people” had already destroyed their home, “and no green was left”.

Despite the white-supremacist tone of the end of the film with a white male saving the Indigenous population, the script had an interesting approach to race. While a mostly-white leadership were leading destructive enterprises, the saviors were a young and multi-racial group of thinkers and dreamers.

The movie presents Pandora’s Indigenous peoples as blueish half animals, not humans. In reality that is the way how some people see our Indigenous peoples in the Americas, almost as sub humans, with no rights to live, to survive. Our peoples are the victims of the permanent greediness of the so called developed nations.

As a result of extraordinary experiments, some of the humans become laboratory-mixed Natives. The Avatars were like a new race, mixed, mestizo individuals who are physically similar to the Indigenous, but mentally more aware of certain things. They learn the spirituality and sciences of nature from the “savages” and with time, they learn that mining is not worth the price of such destruction. Then they become the protectors of Natives, who using a mixture of knowledge, both human and Na’vi, eventually kick the invaders out of their land by actually killing most of them.

Sorry I just told you the rest of movie, but at least I didn’t reveal the romantic part. No worries, you will still enjoy this film.

Avatar represents a new step in the filming industry, not just because of its high technology animation [amazing!] and the way its mixed with real actors, but also because it’s showing us the most likely future of this planet, if we allow it to happen.

In the film, the attacking thugs were a bunch of insensitive corporate and military individuals, working for hidden interests. They would invest money in science, researching and cultural programs in order to win the hearts and minds of Indigenous peoples living in sacred, untouched, pristine forests of a balanced but fragile environment. Those places are the final destinations for destructive mining machinery, ready to extract the insides of the mother land.

Sebastian Machineri told me that Indigenous peoples in the Amazon forests are angry at many non-profits that come to their communities, video record their ways of live, take photos and teach them “modern” skills. Later on, corporations and ranchers move in.

The possible military conflicts to take place in Central and especially in South America in the next years, are related to corporate greediness and special capitalist interests. This is the scary future that awaits to the future generations.

Unless of course, the United States, Europe and other rich countries end their colonialist, imperialistic policies which are designed and dominated by corporate and military machines, true mafias. Like in Avatar, the future of our Pandora is in the hands of “the People” in order to regain the control of our lands, to guarantee a true democracy, to respect our Indigenous peoples with equality, where our planet is preserved and life is sacred again.

Carlos A. Quiroz is a free lance writer and independent journalist , video blogger, activist and artist painter based in Washington, DC. An Indigenous man of Quechua and Muchik heritage from Peru, he writes three blogs: Carlos in DC, Peruanista and Double Spirited. His articles have been published by The Huffington Post, Ground Report and websites in the U.S. Peru and Venezuela. His Twitter is CarlosQC.

Humans, as far as we know, are the first species to revel in culture, thought, language and all its implications. Culture requires brains, and brains of that immense degree were never necessary in any other animal. The human act that demanded immense brain power was the act of art. This requirement is because in art there are no limits.

The rituals of community sound-making, dance and sex are profound spiritual experiences characterized by a loss of individual awareness into a larger communal identity. The dance/sex loop nurtures the experience of our human progenitor individual away from purely self-motivated action to community-oriented action by offering an experience, a spiritual experience, of identity with something larger than the self.

Competition to exhibit artistic prowess in the form of dance drove the practitioners to behave in more and more beautiful and complex patterns, with the most successful dancers being chosen for sex. The genes of the best dancers got passed on. The better dancers had bigger brains, just as predators had bigger brains, because it takes bigger brains to behave in more physically or orally complex ways. Whereby a predator needs a brain only slightly bigger than its prey, an archaic human needs a bigger brain to perform better than his or her peers, a constantly escalating standard. The result was runaway sexual selection. The race was on.

Sexual selection based on an aesthetic increased the speed of evolution exponentially because the demonstrator of the art was practicing an intangible with no demonstrable ceiling in the exercising of the skill, a skill requiring increased brain mass. This sexual selection, specifically, is what never had occurred before in evolution. Peacock feathers evidence a runaway aesthetic, but no increased brain power was required. The verbal facility and plumage of parrots suggest that they may have experienced a similar selective dynamic, and indeed parrots, like humans, have two unusually large cerebral hemispheres with different-sized lobes. But parrots don’t exhibit complex dance. Humans sing and dance.

When the best dancers and singers were picked for procreation, the ones picked were the humans most maturational delayed. Humans sexually selected to perform dance and song were coincidentally selected to mature slower.

Neoteny and Evolution

Slower maturers grow bigger brains because they spend more time at those early childhood states where brains are growing. With neoteny, infant features prolong into adulthood. Embryo features prolong into infanthood. With time, embryo features prolonged into infanthood themselves prolong into adulthood. With the decrease in maturation rates and the continued revealing of more and more infant and child features into the adult phase of a species, there is an increase in both play and sexuality.

‘Our essential somatic properties, i.e. Those which distinguish the human body form from that of other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz they are fetal conditions that have become permanent. What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man.’ (Bolk 1926a, p. 468).

In his most extensive work, Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:

1. Our “flat faced” orthognathy
2. Reduction or lack of body hair.
3. Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair
4. The form of the external ear.
5. The epicanthic (or Mongolian) eyefold.
6. The central position of the foramen magnum (it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates).
7. High relative brain weight.
8. Persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age.
9. The labia majora of women.
10. The structure of the hand and foot.
11. The form of the pelvis.
12. The ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women.
13. Certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures.

To this basic list, Bolk added many additional features; other compendia are presented by Montague (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958) and Keith (1949). The following items follow Montague’s order (pp. 326-327) with some deletions and additions:

14. Absence of brow ridges.
15. Absence of cranial crests.
16. Thinness of skull bones.
17. Position of orbits under cranial cavity.
18. Brachycephaly.
19. Small teeth.
20. Late eruption of teeth.
21. No rotation of the big toe.
22. Prolonged period of infantile dependency.
23. Prolonged period of growth.
24. Long life span.
25. Large body size (related by Bolk, 1926c, p. 39, to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).

The ability of our species to change maturational speeds in combination with art/sex as an accelerator in that process results in the unique species that we are today. But it is in revealing the biological process behind the change in maturation rates–what specifically physiologically causes maturation rates to change in humans–that truly whips away the curtain in this Wizard of Oz story of our unfolding. The biological engine (contrasted with art/sex as the social engine) behind maturational delay and acceleration is changing levels of testosterone.

The Role of Testosterone

Testosterone regulates maturation speed. It occurs on both a general and a specific scale. The story deepens.

General maturation speed is established at six weeks before birth and is based on the level of testosterone in the mother’s blood. Higher or lower levels influence males and females in the opposite direction. A mother with high testosterone will set her son’s maturation timer on slow, her daughter’s on fast. A mother with low testosterone levels will birth a son with fast maturation rates and a daughter moving at a slow pace. Environmental factors can have extremely powerful effects on mothers’ testosterone levels, radically amending maturation speeds. Autism and other disorders characterized by maturational delay or acceleration can and do result.

In humans, as we evolved from the primate progenitor over millions of years up and through homo erectus, sexual selection eventually utilized our ability to adjust maturation rates to increase brain size by slowing down our rates of maturation (by adjusting testosterone levels) in order to become better dancers and sound-makers to achieve more sex. It is a combination of these two processes–tightly focused sexual selection revolving around an aesthetic (also called runaway sexual selection) and neoteny (the ability of a species to unfold over time, prolonging its infant states into adulthood by slowing down maturation rates)–that propels humans through its unique trajectory.

A highly refined aesthetic developed during millions of years of runaway sexual selection characterized by performers (dancers and singers) being chosen by discriminating mates. Having arrived at language, our ancestors got off the evolution express, departed Africa and boarded the societal accelerator.

Evolution continued–our bodies and minds continued to be molded–but now in the context of a symbol-making ability mated to an ancient aesthetic compulsion. These massive brain-based sensibilities became assigned to any and everything around them as speech sexualized the environment, propelling humans to evaluate everything they came in contact with as if they displayed the features of a potential mate. And so society began with a deep appreciation for detail. By the Neolithic, craft was life.

The slow acceleration of the art/sex sexual selection feedback loop can be observed to become a high pitched fever and the center of society when the fossil record reveals males and females coming closer and closer in size. The specific change in dynamics toward the art/sex society was a shift away from the formerly necessary bonus of a relative larger male size and strength for the early hominid males to aggressively compete with one another.

How do we know that this was the case? Fossil remains, though suggestive at best, reveal a high degree of sexual dimorphism between the emerging hominid male and female for at least 2 million or so years after diverging from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Australopithecus afarensis were highly dimorphic, with males almost twice the size of females.

Homo erectus did not evidence this extreme difference. The similarity in size is due to the growth in the size of the female. Among living primate societies, increased sexual dimorphism is exhibited when there is violent intramale competition or frequent harsh contact with forces in the environment. These societies are usually patrifocal. It is unlikely that males and females would be mutually choosing each other as mates according to a physical aesthetic of dance and sound in a patrifocal society.

A highly dimorphic social structure implies males physically threatening each other for procreation rights. The art/sex competition would only be a powerful dynamic in a promiscuous social structure where males cooperate to compete via the aesthetic as opposed to physical strength. Strength alone does not require brains. Survival of the fittest did not make us who we are.

And it is likely that the degree of focus in the matrifocal vs. patrifocal directions varied from band to band, region to region. The less hierarchical, dominant competition between males, the less necessary that males be large and strong and thus the less sexual dimorphism in the fossil record. And a single band or evolutionary pool may have evolved back and forth between the two poles over time. Eventually a line was crossed, probably more than once. Evidence that this crossing occurred is when the fossils show that males and females became far less sexually dimorphic–more similar in size. Matrifocal society had taken hold.

Neoteny and Creativity

There is evidence to suggest we were highly matrifocal up to and past our leaving Africa. The diminution of brain size around 25,000 years ago suggests that a transition to a patrifocal orientation was underway. Patriarchy galloped out of Southern Russia 6,500 years ago and quickly converted old Europe, India and China. Right now, we are in the midst of a synthesis of matrifocal and patrifocal paradigms. From this position, we can observe surges of neoteny moving up through cultures as the neotenous characteristics of earlier stages of our societal ontogeny stream into and through contemporary society.

There are the physical features of our chimpanzee-like progenitors that have prolonged into the adult human of today, such as large brain, small jaw, big eyes, walking on hind legs, location of foramen magnum, etc., and there are the nonphysical features, such as propensity to play, creativity, alertness to that which is different, curiosity, etc. Note the most ancient cultures existing today, the young people in society, the poorest in society, the least empowered, the ethnic minorities, the political Left (representing the disempowered) and the artists.

Features of these groups have been slowly, over thousands of years, been prolonging their way into societies controlled by ruling elites. This slow process over the last three hundred years has accelerated to the point that right now it’s become a convertible ambulance tearing through traffic, driven by ancient healers, carrying herbs and antibiotics in the trunk.

Aboriginals bring land-based spiritual integrity and an intuitive familiarity with the natural balance between independence and interdependence. Neoteny is characterized by close proximity to creative sources. Aboriginal cultures offer an understanding of this frame.

The young bring a form of deep curiosity and confidence that what they imagine can become true. The young are fearless. The young crave fun. Curiosity is a prime feature of neoteny, and imagination is most powerful when acculturation has not been fully engaged.

The poor and the most disempowered bring a dependency on the culture at large, and although at first glimpse this dependency seems like a deficit, from neoteny’s perspective, dependence provides a compulsion to be connected. This compulsion is mingled with intense creativity as the powerless generate art to express their relationship with the connection/disconnection polarity. As a result, they generate music, song, dance, fashion and unique athletic productions that speak for society as a whole.

Ethnic minorities often draw sustenance and inspiration from their former and present experience of poverty and a relatively close proximity to aboriginal or tribal institutions. These wellsprings of inspiration are characteristic of the sources of neoteny: creativity, sense-based spiritual revelation, deep respect for the physical and reverence for rhythm.

The political Left articulates the frustrations and the goals of neoteny’s children, helping to make it possible that the present-time orientation of the aboriginal, the young, the poor and the ethnic minorities be charted into a future that integrates their orientations, strengths and needs.

The artist or creator, along with the child, is neoteny’s mascot. To empower the creative is to bridge the essence of the child into society. Political empowerment is creative empowerment. Political repression is creative repression. To create is a political statement.

The nascent creativity characteristic of all these groups is now bursting into visibility, supercharged by the appearance of the web.

Matrifocal to Patrifocal and back

When the shift from matrifocal to patrifocal occurred that led to males being chosen for their commanding qualities and females for cooperative, neotenous features, a shift also occurred in how societies translated the new hormonal constellation. With the rise in male testosterone, hierarchy took hold. The ancient female-centric cultures were horizontal, transparent and egalitarian. The new male-centered cultures grew increasingly stratified, with resources controlled by fewer and fewer men.

At no time does the influence of the matrifocals completely disappear. Though the societies grow hierarchically taller with time, the artists and others with matrifocal tendencies make grounding contributions that keep the patrifocal edifices from toppling. Until now.

The acceleration that we are in the midst of has most of us astonished by how fast things are changing. Little noticed is how we as a species are changing physically, dispositionally, integrally. Autism, an evolutionary condition, is blossoming across contemporary society. Social structure is radically adjusting to place woman in positions of authority, allowing them to choose their own mate, abort and compete with men. In just 100 years, we are taller, our brains are bigger (after a 25,000-year period of size decrease) and we as a species are becoming more gracile, fragile and vulnerable.

The towers are tumbling as the matrifocals return in force. Maturational-delayed males and maturational-accelerated females are the new convention. Or, the old convention, depending on how far back you go. Whereas we’ve been experiencing the acceleration of society for several thousand years with maturational-accelerated males informing the speed and direction of our societal evolution, now we are experiencing the neotenization of society as transparency, diversity and horizontal communication surge into our everyday.

A collapsing hierarchical society is a society becoming horizontal. We’ve been here before. As we return to the horizontal, we carry with us thousands of years of art, experience and knowledge of the repercussions of our actions. It’s time to be horizontal for a while. It’s time to integrate with our environment, appreciate our surroundings. Maybe in ten thousand years we’ll be ready to start social climbing once again.

In a moonlit night on a spring day,
the croak of a frog
pierces through the whole cosmos
turning it into
a single family.

Chang Chin-ch’en

In the magic of the heart, in the center that is free, at play in the fields of creation, Shiva and Shakti dance together in creativity and love. This energy is an expression of eternal delight, of pure arts discovering themselves again for the first time.

Matter, life and mind are expressions of One divine Logos that the Primordial Man and Woman create through each other. Shiva and Shakti are Man and Woman, liberated and in love, seting each other free. This universe is an overflowing source of this love, a manifested expression of the exuberance of this love. This lovemaking inspires all creation, enabling art, poetry, music, and dancing as the spiritual origins of human culture.

In this infinite round of being, every being is a crown of clear light, informing and irradiating all things. Everyone inherits the ability to open a channel for helping to shape culture through creative expression and artistic action in the world. Grounded solidly in what we have come here to do, we all share and are connected in a greater movement we are creating together. Our thoughts are each others thoughts, a collective chorus of life, the unified thoughts of the uni-verse, the One Song. We are all part of each other. “Todos unidos !” – All united.

So here we are at the end of everything, a perfect moment to reinvent the future through the present. To rejoin the end with the beginning, connecting end-ways with first ways, in the Oroboric feedback loop of the perpetual present. For that unfathomable moment of conception is endlessly resurrected, and flowers in the Now.

Firmly grounded in the present, we wake up to the magical destiny of our long lineage of light. The spiritual practices of the world help us to dance outside of linear time and into the ahistorical present, into the centre of the labyrinth of mind where the World Tree, ‘Axis Mundi’, can be explored for wisdom and medicine. Gnosis liberates us from our habits and unties us from the restrictions, blockages and inhibitions around our essence which strives for unity by promoting a loving open-system for relating to energy and information. From this well of knowledge comes art, poetry, music and dance, all containing visions of the world within the world. It is from these visions that we may glimpse the potentials through which the present world can transform into the future world. The creative imagination is a guiding sign in worlds manifold journey towards actualization.

There is a deep ecology of spirit immanent within the endless flow of physical, chemical, electrical energies of our universe. We are being called out of the historical present to rediscover our kinship with a more-than-human world, interlinking with the individual and collective minds of kindred animal, mineral and plant species. Co-creating a unified communication of health and harmony, understanding that our actions have implications at every level of life on the planet, we are coming together with other living things to collectively steward the present in order to build a sustainable future. Using art as a starting point for mapping the possible and linking archaic and modern technology, visionary culture is able to apply creativity and integrate wisdom more than ever before.

By nurturing a supple awareness of how the natural ecologies of the earth work in relation to climatic and galactic patterns, we can come to understand the long term consequences of our actions on many levels at once. In this way, plant paradigms like permaculture promote the refinement of our perspective and the conscious shift of our behavioral approaches to growth and development in the world. Understanding the forest as a metaphor for a stable and healthy relationship ecology, the emerging art movements model designs in nature in order to integrate concepts like energy cycling, no-waste consumption, co-dependent relationships, and biodiversity. Plant paradigms bring us a set of malleable techniques and technologies for healing our relationship with ourselves, each other, plants and the planet.

The standing wave of our collective artistic intention crystalises through time via innumerable iterations, into the ornate and baroque structures of civilization. Humanity has walled ourselves up in ego – in mental constructs – which crystalize around us as artificial and dislocated environments like urban sprawls, credit debt and government control. Smoke stacks, fumes from an ineffable petrochemical metabolism confuse the planet and toxify our collective ecology at every level of organism. This world is only the outcome of a certain view. First we make our buildings, then our buildings make us.

In gratitude

Breathe

Starseed Transmission

Paintings by David Heskin

The creative imagination is vitalized and inspired by a reconnection to the Gaian fertility circuit. Our creativity is our most valuable faculty for regenerating the web of life and moving humanity beyond its current existential and ecological blind alley. Art, music, poetry and dance are universal languages creating foundations for an authentic planetary culture. With these skillsets we are able to address and navigate the intricate problems of our time.

Visionary culture is one of the spirit seeds for the emerging civilization, a set of pathways into the collective creation of a sustainable world. The development of art, poetry, music and dance is at the cusp of a long lineage of transformational growth that can be traced back long before the humble origins of our current world. At this time of turmoil our spiritual destiny is awakening again, a vessel to transport us across the rift of impending ecological collapse. Redefining our roles as planetary stewards and redesigning our collective approach to saving the biosphere, we are presented with a toolset for activating our potential to play an active role in the unfolding. Utilizing the unlimited potentials of the empowered creative imagination provides human culture with the evolutionary option of harmonizing with the more than human world.

Magical awareness
Gaian tapestry
pure elemental frequencies
mapping the landscapes
(like falling water
life streaming from void)

within seed chambers
and honeycombed lattices of light:
an infinite empire of beauty

worlds within worlds
ecologies within ecologies
planting futures
through supple exchanges
between seen and unseen

here we are in this place
of shining stones forever
experiencing the presence

Delvin Solkinson – www.elfintome.com
Daniel Mirante – www.lila.info
David Heskin – www.newskinstudio.com

‘Nectarian’ is a word I propose to describe a deep ecological current within visionary or spirit art, it evokes the work of the birds and bees as they pollinate, sip nectar and distill honey from the flowering plants of primodial Gaia. It describes the rich symbiosis of life, that everything that exists, lives. And all that lives, is One.

The hummingbird is the quintessential symbol of the Nectarian form of art. The hummingbird, the magically high-frequency flying gem of a bird, is seen as a portentious power animal, a gatekeeper of the secrets of the forest in indigenous shamanism. Its shining and shimmering visage conjures up the colour and boundary dissolving modalities of shamanic, transpersonal experiences. In Brazil the hummingbird is called the ‘beija-flor’ – kisser-of-flowers. This beautiful poetic term describes the deep sensuality of the intimate engagement with Nature that is envisaged by Nectarian art.

Nature is the originator of language and by observing her flows we come into awareness of the cycles and patterns that govern our lives. Observance of nature is the progenitor of metaphor, and metaphor is the foundation of poetry, myth, shamanry and visual art. In a sense, nature is all that we know because it is ‘Every-thing’. Our entire brains and minds are Nature and generated by nature to interface with nature. Nature is everything, the Kali-like wrath and the deep sweetness.

The Nectarian vision encompasses all of nature – which is not to say it excludes civilisation or machinery, but that it qualifies in its vision such cultural artifacts as expressions of Nature. The Nectarian vision explores an all-encompassing fertility circuit in which beings can intimately couple with the cosmic and Gaian processes in non-dual ways. In the Nectarian vision nature is not a creation apart from spirit. We already live within a Spirit realm, a spiritual wilderness that completely transcends the division between inner and outer, imagination and reason, consciousness and matter.

Nectarian art is distinguished as a distinct current within visionary art by its insistence of an anchoring within bodily and Gaian relatedness. Nectarian art often includes the re-affirming of oneness with the human mind and body and the great evolutionary tree of life, or ‘hypersea’ as biologist Lynn Marguilis called it. This means that species both similar (eg. dolphins, monkeys, cats) and dissimilar to ourselves (such as plankton, bacteria, and stellar bodies such as spiral galaxies and stars) are commonly included in Nectarian art.

Water and elemental mysteries are also prominently evoked in Nectarian art. The biogenesis of creatures from the crystal realms of water, and this continuing inseperable connectivity with the ocean is a common motif, as is the flow of magma from volcanoes. Hawaii has been a prominent motif in a lot of grass-roots Nectarian art.

Much visionary art purports to represent transcendent spiritual dimensions which are full of high saturation patterns, linguistic codes, esoteric symbols and glyphs. Nectarian art represents these spirit-glyphs in their immanent form, subtly informing the flowing patterns of water, bark and leaves, as well as the gothic-organic geometries of the human body, in the divine natural subtleties of colors and tones that nature effortlessly composes. Esoteric abstract geometrical systems of mystical thought are de-emphasised in Nectarian art, it does not depend upon an esoteric tradition for its interpretation, although the more ecologically connected participant would likely find more to appreciate in sympathy.

Rather than representing the ‘exclusive divinity’ of human self-hood, the Nectarian vision is selfless as a flock of birds, as wolves and deer in the chase, or a primordial tao shamaness riding the clouds. Observing the current of life on this planet one senses a vast and selfless process of intelligence, a vast metabolism, which is at the same time a vast sentience of cosmic drama, storytelling, and experience, which flows completely beyond our rigid and fragile categorical orderings.

Nectarian art affirms our journey on this planet as something to be celebrated, rather than something to seek ‘transcendence’ from through some kind of mental spiritual development. It is thus similar to the left-hand path of tantric yogi’s. It is also similar in this sense in its celebration of voluptuous poly-amorous sexuality, woman, child, community and nurturing energies. We see such celebration in the work of Mark Henson, who’s psychedelic tantric paintings are reminiscent of Chola dynasty bronzes and tantric indian temple sculpture. In such a vision Desire is part of Divinity and cannot be seperated. “Before God was Kam (desire)” – The Vedas.

The ‘modern’ art establishment overlooks such art, for such an institutionalized mind finds Nectarian art embarrassing it in its lack of self-conscious irony and its unchecked enthusiasm for the experience of wonder. Despite this, many of the great artists throughout history have been Nectarian in orientation.

Nectarian art is vastly informed by dialog with plant teachers and fertile ecosystems. It is thus fundamentally shamanic and in its purest sense bioregional – reflective of the forms, traditions, and cycles innate to ones lands. Though it is true that ‘every part contains the whole’ tapping into ones locality one indeed finds ‘the all’.

Nectarian art includes within it Romantic and Naive traditions. There is a summoning forth of an ideal of nature which is uncontaminated by radioactive wastes and dioxins. It honours, even worships a pre-industrial nature which is pristine, crystaline. Thus some of this art constitutes an ‘Earth prayer’, bringing a remembering of natural mysteries to the forefront of artistic meditation and again affirming the inherent wonder and complexity of natural phenomena as both inspirational and instructional.

In an age of climate chaos and an increasing awareness of both the beauty and fragility of ecological complexity, Nectarian art serves as a ‘medicine culture’, a prayer, affirmation and celebration of ‘the real’, the infinitely deep and ornate planetary jeweled garden in which we live our lives.

Some notable Nectarian artists :

Mark Henson
Maura Holden
Pablo Amaringo
Jarah Tree
Frida Kahlo
Gauguin
Van Gogh
Samuel Palmer
William Blake
Breugel
Gaudi
Csontvary
Henri Rousseau

And many many more…